Compitum

Cristina Rosillo-López, Public Opinion and Politics in the Late Roman Republic, Cambridge, 2017.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
280 pages
ISBN : 9781107145078
75 £

This book investigates the working mechanisms of public opinion in Late Republican Rome as a part of informal politics. It explores the political interaction (and sometimes opposition) between the elite and the people through various means, such as rumours, gossip, political literature, popular verses and graffiti. It also proposes the existence of a public sphere in Late Republican Rome and analyses public opinion in that time as a system of control. By applying the spatial turn to politics, it becomes possible to study sociability and informal meetings where public opinion circulated. What emerges is a wider concept of the political participation of the people, not just restricted to voting or participating in the assemblies.

Argues that public opinion existed in the Late Roman Republic and analyses its working mechanisms
Explores a wider approach to the political participation of the people
Applies the spatial turn to politics in order to locate informal politics in its actual archaeological setting.

Source : Cambridge University Press

Paula Hershkowitz, Prudentius, Spain, and late antique Christianity: poetry, visual culture, and the cult of martyrs, Cambridge, 2017.

Éditeur : Cambridge University Press
xiii, 254 pages
ISBN : 9781107149601

This book provides an innovative approach to the Hispano-Roman Christian poet Prudentius and his poetry. It is a breakthrough in Prudentian scholarship which unifies the differing disciplines of history, archaeology, literature and art history in arguing that Prudentius and his envisaged Spanish audience cannot be fully understood in isolation from their environment in late fourth- and early fifth-century Spain. Paula Hershkowitz focuses on Prudentius' Peristephanon, his collection of verses celebrating the deaths of martyrs, and places these poems within the context of Prudentius' world, uniquely employing material, visual and textual remains as evidence for its religious, social and cultural affiliations. It also draws on this material evidence to contextualise Prudentius' awareness of the significance of the visual as a means of promoting beliefs against the background of this crucial formative period in religious history when many of his Spanish audience were not yet fully committed to the Christian faith.

Source : Cambridge University Press

Robert Germany, Mimetic contagion: art and artifice in Terence's Eunuch, Oxford-New York, 2016.

Éditeur : Oxford University Press
Collection : Oxford studies in ancient culture and representation
vi, 198 pages
ISBN : 9780198738732
55 £

When we are confronted with a work of art, what is its effect on us? In contrast to post-Enlightenment conceptions, which tend to restrict themselves to aesthetic or discursive responses, the ancient Greeks and Romans often conceived works of art as having a more dynamic effect on their viewers, inspiring them to direct imitation of what they saw represented. This notion of 'mimetic contagion' was a persistent and widespread mode of framing response to art across the ancient world, discernible in both popular and elevated cultural forms, yet deployed differently in various historical contexts; it is only under the specificity of a particular cultural moment's concerns that it becomes most useful as a lens for understanding how that culture is attempting to negotiate the problems of representation.

Grégory Ems et Mathieu Minet (éd.), Les arts poétiques du XIII^e au XVII^e siècle: tensions et dialogue entre théorie et pratique, Turnhout, 2017.

Éditeur : Brepols
Collection : Latinitates 10
338 pages
ISBN : 978-2-503-52991-2
90 €

La notion d'« Art poétique » recouvre une réalité plurielle et protéiforme : les ouvrages ainsi qualifiés se proposent, selon les âges et les contextes, de catégoriser, de normaliser ou de canoniser les pratiques poétiques. Entre la pratique et la théorisation au sens large se jouent dès lors des rapports complexes, qu'interrogent les seize contributions regroupées dans ce volume, où cette problématique est envisagée selon un large spectre de périodes et de langues, mais également dans une perspective pluridisciplinaire.

Joseph R. Dodson et David E. Briones (éd.), Paul and Seneca in Dialogue, Leyde-Boston, 2017.

Éditeur : Brill
Collection : Ancient philosophy & religion
xviii, 340 pages
ISBN : 9789004341357
138 €

Paul and Seneca in Dialogue assembles an international group of scholars to compare the philosophical and theological strands in Paul and Seneca's writings, placing them in dialogue with one another. Arguably, no other first-century, non-Christian writer's thoughts resemble Paul's as closely as Seneca's, and scholars have often found value in comparing Pauline concepts with Seneca's writings. Nevertheless, apart from the occasional article, broad comparison, or cross-reference, an in-depth critical comparison of these writers has not been attempted for over fifty years – since Sevenster's monograph of 1961. In the light of the vast amount of research offering new perspectives on both Paul and Seneca since the early 1960s, this new comparison of the two writers is long overdue.

Loïc Borgies, Le conflit propagandiste entre Octavien et Marc Antoine. De l'usage politique de la uituperatio entre 44 et 30 a. C. n., Bruxelles, 2016.

Éditeur : Latomus, 357
518 pages
ISBN : 978-90-429-3459-7
74 euros

En se criblant mutuellement d'origines obscures et dégradantes, de cruauté, de lâcheté, d'incompétence oratoire et littéraire, de débauches, de luxure, d'ivrognerie et autres traits infamants, Octavien et Marc Antoine, entre 44 et 30 a. C. n., tentèrent de démolir systématiquement l'image de leur adversaire politique respectif auprès de divers publics. Or, le rôle joué par ces invectives n'a pas encore suffisamment retenu l'attention de la recherche, ce qui est d'autant plus regrettable que le genre rhétorique de la uituperatio se prête à merveille à une utilisation critique du concept de propagande et remet en question la primauté généralement accordée aux émissions monétaires et à la poésie. Par sa structure tripartite, ce livre offre, pour la première fois, une vue globale de la uituperatio de cette période, analysée tour à tour selon les thèmes rhétoriques des invectives, les publics auxquels elle s'adresse, et les formes et les supports par lesquels elle est véhiculée. Il démontre que, par sa virulence et la vigueur de son expression, la uituperatio ne devient pas seulement une arme de guerre, mais préfigure aussi les fondements idéologiques du Principat augustéen.

Source : Peeters.